Abandoned

by Allison Brennan

  “Colter wants to have lunch with Max,” Ryan said.

  David looked at Max and raised his eyebrow, but didn’t say anything.

  “Tread carefully,” Dillon said. “He wants to know what you know.”

  “I don’t know anything about these paintings.”

  “Don’t tell him that you have those postcards. He could see it as proof that you were privy to Martha’s deception. Everything else—the truth helps you here. You’re simply looking to find out what happened to your mother sixteen years ago. Focus on that not the art, and you might be able to get information from him. As soon as he thinks you have information that he does not—information that will lead to his coveted stolen art—he will be in control.”

  David said, “That would suggest that he doesn’t have the art. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have come here as soon as Max showed up asking questions about her mother.”

  “You’re likely right.”

  “Why did she send me the postcards?” she asked bluntly. “I was a teenager. I could have thrown them away. I didn’t know what they meant, and there was no way that she’d know I would ever look for her or see the pattern.”

  “I’m a criminal psychiatrist, Max, not a psychic. There’s a lot of complexity in your mother’s behavior because it is unpredictable. Yet, it’s clear she has some sort of personality disorder that prevented her from feeling remorse, from developing emotional attachments to anyone. I suspect Jimmy and Martha fed off each other, and that mutual love of the game, of spontaneity, and conning people—she would have easily seen that as love. She had a soul mate, someone who was just like her. But he wasn’t.”

  “What?” Ryan said. “You just said—”

  “I know what it sounds like, but Jimmy is a classic con artist. He may have cared about Martha on the surface, but initially he hooked up with her for his own con. That he learned she was more like him than not kept him around. I looked at his criminal records and what Max sent me about his family. The man conned his own mother out of her life savings. He never paid it back; from what we’ve learned he never even apologized. He doesn’t have the remorse gene at all. And that’s why I think Colter didn’t know he was involved with the art thefts. Maybe Martha and Jimmy weren’t together at the time or maybe they were in it together. Jimmy may have thought Colter might know him or his name, which is why he could have taken another identity. The Eastern Shore is a small place.”

  Max said, “So when Colter figured out Martha stole from him, Jimmy disappeared. Just walked away because it was dangerous.”

  “Left his girlfriend and her baby?” David said. “That’s his kid and he knew they were in danger, yet he abandoned them?”

  David was livid, and his deep sense of loyalty and honor was one of the reasons Max cared for him. He had gotten his high school girlfriend pregnant in an attempt to prove to his football teammates that he wasn’t gay, and while he had been messed up as a teen, he had found purpose in the army. He hadn’t come out of the closet for a long time, and Max didn’t think he was fully out now—only those closest to him knew the truth. David would never put his daughter—or anyone’s child—in danger.

  “You can’t view him through your own eyes, David,” Dillon said. “You have to think like he thinks.”

  “He’s a bastard, that’s what I think.”

  “This is one of the reasons forensic psychology is a difficult career—we have to get into the heads of these people in order to not only understand them, but to think like them so we can stop them.”

  “Does that mean Jimmy walked, Martha panicked, and came here to Cape Haven? Why?” Max was still confused. “Why leave Eve with Jimmy’s mother if Jimmy himself bailed on her? Why didn’t she call her real family if she was in so much trouble, in danger? She had to know that Eleanor would take them in. Protect her, as much as she could.”

  Her voice cracked at the end. She would never understand the choices that Martha Revere made. Never. Had she hated Eleanor so much that she wouldn’t call her for help?

  “Max, I know that—”

  She cut him off. “My family has nearly unlimited resources. They could have hired a private security detail to protect her. They would have taken Eve in, no questions, just like they accepted me. But she didn’t call. She didn’t ask for help. So why send me all these ridiculous postcards to play her own private game and not come to me when everything fell apart?”

  She was shouting, and that surprised her. Max was usually very good at controlling her emotions.

  “Max,” Dillon said quietly, “we don’t know her state of mind in that moment. She had a three-month-old daughter, her boyfriend had walked out, and she thought she was in danger. The decision to leave the baby could have been spontaneous, or she thought she could talk her way out of the situation if she confronted Colter herself and left Eve with her grandmother, fully expecting to return for her. But be grateful that she did because that one selfless act may have saved the child’s life.”

  “I guarantee you that Martha Revere never acted selflessly. She had a specific reason for leaving Eve,” Max said. “I don’t know what, but it wasn’t to protect her.”

  “Max, I’m going to call you privately,” Dillon said. “I think we’re done here?”

  “Yes, thank you, Doc,” Ryan said. “We appreciate your time.”

  Max disconnected the Skype call and walked into her den and closed the door without saying anything to Ryan or David. She didn’t know what to say—she had lost her cool. She didn’t do things like that.

  A minute later, her cell phone rang.

  “Hello, Dillon.”

  “Can you talk?”

  “I told you, I don’t have secrets from David and Ryan, but yeah, I’m alone.”

  “This is more sensitive. First, are you okay?”

  “Dillon, don’t shrink me. I’m not in the mood.”

  “Being abandoned by your mother when you were nine is one thing—it affects you, how could it not? Yet you created a satisfying and fulfilling life. But all this information you’ve uncovered in the last two months about your mother—not the least of which is that she had another child—has to affect you on a deeper level. I don’t want you to ignore those feelings.”

  “I’m not,” she said. She sat at the desk chair and put her head in her hands. “Yes, I feel like every piece of new information is a kick in the face. The postcards. The art theft. The relationship with Jimmy. I knew him, Dillon. He hated me and I hated him and she picked him over me. That bothered me for a long time, but I always assumed that she dumped him eventually because that’s what she did to everyone in her life. I’m not ignoring anything. I want to find out what happened to Martha, and if Jimmy—or Phillip Colter—or someone else killed her, I want them to go to prison. I want to find out why.”

  “I wanted to talk to you about your father.”

  Her stomach tightened. “I told you everything I know.”

  “And it still bothers you. You want to know why your mother lied to you about his identity. You said something earlier—that your mother has never committed a selfless act. It got me thinking about why she didn’t tell you the truth about your own paternity.”

  She let out a sigh. “Are you sure you’re not psychic?”

  “I’ve been accused of it, but no—that question has infused everything you do. It disturbs you. You confronted the man you thought was your biological father, he denied it, even had a paternity test to prove it, and that tore you up. Yet you continued to grow and mature and have already accomplished more in your thirty-two years than most people do in a lifetime. Yet once you knew that she’d lied to you about your father, there was nothing you could do because your mother was gone. She’d stopped sending postcards. You believed that she was dead for years because she stopped collecting her allowance. But I’m going to tell you: The single best thing she ever did for you, Max, was leave you with your grandparents. It may not have been selfless on her part, but it was the best decision for you, even if s
he didn’t think of it that way. I know your childhood wasn’t normal or easy. Yet your grandparents took you in and never made you feel less. You said that to me a while back, and it resonated.”

  “I have thought a lot about this lately, that Martha did me a great favor. And then I thought, why? Why give me to the woman she hated?”

  “She thought she was punishing you,” Dillon said. “You wouldn’t play her game, so she mentally thought, well, let’s see how she likes growing up like I did. Another form of manipulation. But—and this is important to understand—she felt she’d found her soul mate in Jimmy Truman. You and he didn’t get along, so she got rid of you.”

  “Why didn’t she leave me with my father?” Max asked the question that had been on her mind for years.

  “Because I don’t think she knows who your father is.”

  “Well, she must have a list somewhere,” she said sarcastically.

  “Maybe. She was twenty-one. Young. Wild. Rich. I don’t think the thought crossed her mind to figure out who it was. She might have had an idea—this guy or that guy—but it wasn’t important to her. That it was important to you bothered her, because that made her feel inadequate.”

  Dillon continued, “When we met I was impressed with you. I reviewed your biography, watched some of your shows, realized that you have made a really good life for yourself. Partly because you had a family who could afford to support your dreams, but at the same time don’t assume that just because you came from a privileged family that you have made a life. Like I said earlier—I lean to nature over nurture, at least that nature is going to trump most of what life hands you. I’m not saying that your past—the nurture part of your past—hasn’t affected you. It has. It didn’t change you, it brought out different parts of your personality. It influenced you and the choices you’ve made in your career. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, and I hope you don’t, either. Society needs people like you—strong and resilient. I just wanted to make sure that you weren’t going to let my analysis of your mother and her behavior impact your choices from here on out—your personal choices.”

  “Just don’t tell me I need a psychotherapist. I tried it once last summer and thought I was going to throw her out the window.”

  “Formal therapy helps some people and not others, but there’s a lot of informal therapy. You have a strong support structure around you. Don’t be afraid to keep them close.”

  “Thank you, Dillon.”

  “You can call me anytime, Max. I’m serious about that, okay?”

  “And I’m serious about dinner.”

  “Well, you’re not far from me. When you wrap up this case, why don’t you come by? We live in Georgetown and have plenty of room for you to stay the night.”

  “I might just take you up on that.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Ryan grabbed a beer and walked out on the deck, trying to wrap his mind around everything the shrink had said. David followed him out. Ryan tried to give him the benefit of the doubt—he was close to Max, he wasn’t involved with her romantically, and clearly Max trusted him. But the guy had been giving him the cold shoulder since he walked in.

  “You know Dr. Kincaid?” Ryan asked David.

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t expand. “I read the article Max wrote about the Blair Caldwell trial. It was intense.” Nothing. “Tragic, really.” Again, silence.

  Ryan shifted gears. “Kincaid seems to know what he’s talking about, though my experience with the FBI’s profilers is hit-and-miss. What do you think?”

  “Max will find the truth.”

  “Sure, no doubt, but just mulling this over—if Martha and Jimmy worked together to steal from Colter, he wouldn’t give a shit about Max being here if he had all the paintings. He wants the three we haven’t recovered.”

  He waited for David to comment. When he didn’t, Ryan was done beating around the bush.

  “What’s your problem, David?”

  “No problem.”

  “You walked in here with a chip on your shoulder and an attitude like I’m the bad guy.”

  “Are you?”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  David didn’t say anything.

  Ryan didn’t like games. Never had. “Ask me anything.”

  “I’ll just tell you. Leave Max alone.”

  “Max is a big girl. She can make her own decisions.”

  David turned to him, looked him straight in the eye. “This is my problem, Maguire. Max has put herself—again—in a dangerous situation. She never realizes it because she is so driven to find the truth that she develops blinders. She is smart, don’t get me wrong, but her drive is so strong she dismisses that she’s in jeopardy. You were here to watch her back. Instead, you shared her bed. You can’t protect her if you’re compromised.”

  “Good thing she has you,” Ryan snapped back.

  “Damn straight.”

  This was getting them nowhere.

  “I don’t get it. Really. Because you say one thing, but you’re acting like an overprotective big brother who thinks that no man is good enough for his baby sister.”

  “There are few men I think are good enough for Maxine.”

  “And you’re going to pass judgment on me like this?” He snapped his fingers.

  “We’ll say this—the jury is deadlocked. The only thing you have going for you is that Max is—generally—a good judge of character. But even she can be wrong.”

  * * *

  Max came out of her den and saw David and Ryan on the deck. By their body language, they weren’t just shooting the breeze. Great. She didn’t need any more conflict in her life.

  She started making dinner and they both came in. David had picked up the phone and was listening. Ryan glanced at her, then went into the den and stared at her timeline. It bothered her that he was looking at the past—before Martha disappeared. Looking at the moments in her childhood that had defined her.

  “Thank you, Rogan,” David said. “We appreciate—yeah, I know. Gray area.” He smiled—as much as David’s smiles were—and ended the call. “Your PI went above and beyond. My storage locker theory panned out. Rogan found one that matches all our criteria.”

  She tilted her head. “Do I sense we can’t say where we got the information?”

  “We can say that nothing is admissible in court, unless the authorities get a warrant.”

  “I don’t care—we’ll uncover the truth and then see what happens.”

  Ryan stood in the doorway. “Did I just hear that you obtained information illegally?”

  David glared at him. “Maybe you should go home now so you don’t have to deal with fruit from the poisonous tree.”

  Ryan was both angry and torn. “This isn’t how we do these things.”

  Max wished she could have talked to David alone. It seemed he wanted to create conflict between her and Ryan, and she just didn’t understand it. Yet, she had hired Sean Rogan to get her information she needed to find out what happened to her mother. She would take that information any day of the week, no matter how he obtained it. The truth trumped all else. And if Ryan didn’t accept that about her, then they didn’t have a future.

  Future? What the hell was she thinking? She’d slept with the guy one night, why was she thinking about more?

  Because she liked Ryan. It was as simple as that. But Max had never been one to change to accommodate a boyfriend, which was why she was most likely going to be single her entire life. That didn’t bother her. Her confidence and happiness wasn’t attached to others. It couldn’t be, or she’d implode. For too long she had lived based on the whims of her mother. She tried to be what her mother wanted, but failed. Maybe Dillon was right. At her core, her nature, she couldn’t be anything else, and neither could Martha.

  “Excuse me, David,” she said and, without waiting for a response, went into the den and closed the doors so she and Ryan had privacy.

  “Do not tell me that you committed a c
rime,” Ryan said.

  “I haven’t.”

  “But—”

  “I hired an expert, I don’t ask how he gets his information, but I’m not going to burn him. Suffice it to say, he’s an expert with computers. We asked him to look at storage lockers in default between the time Martha disappeared and two years after Jimmy last showed his face. Evidently, he found one, and David was about to give me the details. But maybe you should sit this one out. I do understand that it puts you between a rock and a hard place. And I can’t for certain say that he obtained the information legally. I’m not going to ask him.”

  “Gray area,” Ryan repeated what David had said.

  “Don’t be sore. Maybe it’s good that you are confronted with these ethical dilemmas now. I’m a reporter, I don’t have to follow the same rules you do. I respect your rules—I believe in the system most of the time. But I will break rules when I have to in order to learn the truth. I’m not going to back down.”

  “And what if it jeopardizes a conviction?”

  “And what if towing the line results in someone else getting hurt?”

  “What if you get hurt?”

  “I’m not blind to the danger, but I’m not going to back away. I want to know what my PI found. He wouldn’t have called if he didn’t think it was important. If you don’t want to know it, that’s okay. I’m not going to hold it against you. And I just hope you don’t hold my rule-breaking inclination against me.”

  “This is important to you,” he said as if he had a major revelation.

  “This is me,” she said simply.

  Ryan stepped forward and touched her cheek lightly, then he leaned down and kissed her. “Okay. Talk to David, then just tell me what I need to know and I don’t want to know where you got it.”

  She smiled. “When you first walked into the restaurant Wednesday night, I knew you didn’t always play by the rules.”

  “David doesn’t think I’m good enough for you.”

  “So?”

  “I think you listen to him.”